App Review: CameraBag 2

CameraBag 2 for Mac takes the essentials from the popular iOS app and adds a lot more options, allowing you to take more creative control over images using the more powerful processing and bigger screen of a desktop computer.

A stalwart in the photo category of the iOS App Store for a while, CameraBag from Nevercenter has been popular with lo-fi photo fans for years, thanks to its simple interface and effective 'one shot' filters. A version for desktops, CameraBag 1 proved popular, but with CameraBag 2, Nevercenter has completely redesigned the app from the ground up.

CameraBag 2 has proven a huge commercial success already, and after its release earlier this year the Mac version briefly became the highest-grossing non-Apple app in the Mac App Store. CameraBag 2 is intended to be an all-in-one editing tool with a plethora of vintage effects paired with what Nevercenter describes as a 'full suite of photographic tools' such as exposure and luminance controls. It has an extremely simple interface, showing your selected image large in the window with all the available effects visible on tabs to the right of your photo. In any editing tab, you can choose the 'Quicklooks' view and see what your photo would look like with any of the pre-made filters added to it.

The 'Quicklooks' view allows you to see at a glance how your photo would look with any of CameraBag 2's filters applied.

Key Features:

Over 100 adjustable filters.

Exposure, color balance, shadow/highlight controls

Batch editing.

'Quicklooks' and live previews.

Fast processing.

RAW compatible.

Operating Requirements:

Mac: OSX 10.5 or newer, Intel CPU (Core 2 Duo or better)*

Windows: XP SP3, Vista, or Windows 7

1GB RAM

70MB hard drive space

At $29 from Nevercenter’s website (and $23.99 in the Mac App Store), CameraBag 2 is slightly pricier than an app like Nik Software's Snapseed, but still cheaper than Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Photoshop Elements. CameraBag also has an edge over one-trick apps like Snapheal or Photosplash as it features both filter effects and basic editing tools. For this review, I will take you though the steps of editing a photo in CameraBag from importing to creating a filter and batch processing.

Importing

CameraBag 2 is compatible with JPG, PNG, TIFF, and most RAW file formats. For this review, I imported a .NEF file from a Nikon DSLR. You can read more information about file handling and compatibility in Nevercenter's FAQ, which is here.

You can import photos into CameraBag 2 by dragging them into the window, clicking the 'Load' option in the welcome page, or by going to File / Open. Once you have opened an image, you can browse through other photos in the folder within CameraBag 2 by using your right and left arrow keys.

Styles

After loading your photo, CameraBag 2 with push you straight into the 'Styles tab where you can add various (an initially overwhelming) effects. You can choose to skip this step and move straight to the Adjustments tab if you only want to do subtle light and color adjustments. After you have made changes in the Adjustments tab, you can add a Style by returning to the Styles tab and clicking the '+' that will appear to the right of the filter name after a brief hover. Every time you hover over a name of a style, a live preview of the style’s effect on your photo will appear.

For this image I chose the delightfully retro “Light Leak” style.

I used the remix slider to make the photo appear as if the light was leaking from the right and left side of the camera, leaving my subject unaffected.

The 18 styles available in CameraBag 2 range from toy-camera effects like 'Plastic' to the more flattering 'Wedding' options and all are customizable using the 'Amount' slider to adjust the intensity of the effect and the 'Remix' slider to adjust the variation. The 'Remix' slider in particular is great for creating unique effects. For example, in the 'Hipster' style, the 'Remix' slider will adjust the vignette, color balance, light curves, and film grain size as you move from either end of the spectrum. For quick, batch editing of party photos, this could be where it ends - creating your unique effect and saving.

Adjustments

Not all of the tricks in CameraBag 2 are meant to make your pictures look like they were taken using a 19th-Century pinhole camera with a scratchy lens. Under the 'Adjustments' tab, you can crop, straighten, and control the levels of your photo using exposure, contrast, and saturation options. Under the 'Light' controls, you can adjust the RGB and Luminance Curves as well as adjust the shadows and highlights. The 'Color' controls let you do everything from color correction to split tone and selective saturation and the 'Photographic' effects add options like vignetting, film grain, and discoloration.

Every time you add an effect, a tile appears at the bottom of the screen. Here, you can return to your affects at any time to edit, change the layering of your effects, click the power-button to hide your effect, or the 'x' to remove it.

This screengrab shows my photo with the “Light Leak” tile deactivated. In the Crop/Straighten tab, a slider will straighten and auto-crop your photo. If you want to crop further, you can use the manual cropping tool with a rule-of-thirds grid built in or choose on of the many, pre-made ratios.

Adjustments is where you will also find the 'Constrain Size' option for saving your file - a rather strange place for it, as most photographers would expect to see this option somewhere in the file save dialog. This option appears as a tile next to your other adjustments and will be applied to all photos during batch editing.

Adding a Border

After you are done styling and adjusting, you can add a border. Options here range from simple, customizable borders to elaborate film-style frames. While some of these borders are subtle and only add a texture on the edges of the image, the bigger frames will auto-crop your photo.

Finishing Up

Once you have created the perfect look for you photo, its time to save it. And I don't just mean save your image - a feature I really like is the ability to save the effects that you've applied to an image as a filter, which you can use again in the future. Whether you design your own filter or use one of the 'pre-baked' options, you can give a large folder of photos the same, distinct look by using the 'Batch Process' option.

If you like what you've done so much that you want to process other images in the same way, you can save your adjustments as a new filter. Simply choose the 'Add Current…' button and choose a name. CameraBag 2 will add your adjustments to the Favorites tab.

If you want to apply your choice of effects to more than one image, you can batch process entire folders of pictures very easily. Just go to 'Batch Process Folder' in the File menu....

...and add a 'postfix' that you want added to the filenames of your processed images....

...create a new folder for the processed files, and you're done.

Batch processing takes a little time but will move much faster if you use the 'Constrain Size' option found in the adjustments tab. To give you some idea, batch processing a folder of 70 photos totaling 449MB took nearly 10 minutes on my Mac when set to export at full size, and 5 minutes using the 'Constrain Size' option to limit the width to 1200 pixels.

Conclusion

CameraBag 2 is great for batch editing photos, but I would not recommend it as a primary photo editing program as the tools and adjustments are not quite as precise as they should be. The sliders are great for quick editing, but for the perfectionist, it can be draining trying to toggle your way into the perfect light/shadow mix. You also cannot zoom in to see the details of your photograph during the editing process. Your photo will only ever be as big as your window will let it get which was fine for me on my large iMac, but an 11-inch Macbook Air user would be out of luck. This seems such a glaring omission that I'd be surprised if Nevercenter didn't fix it in an update.

Although CameraBag 2 is lacking in a couple of areas, its redeeming features far outweigh its weaknesses. The live previews and Quicklooks make editing photos extremely fast and easy, its many pre-made filters and styles are all customizable (which saves on the 'my photos look like everyone else's' effect), and the quick and easy batch processing is great.

In the future, I would like to see a customizable watermark feature as well as zoom-able viewing controls, but for now, CameraBag 2 has rightfully earned its place on the top of the App Store photo market.

With so many great new cameras around, I would prefer if DPreview was concentrating on speedy cameras reviews.

I remember a time when reading the reviews of my favorite photo amateur magazines it was all like déjà vu. But now it goes the other way around : their reviews are already out, but we are till waiting for the definitive review of DPreview for too many cameras. And what do you do in the mean time ? Review toy apps !

Its a filter collection with tweaking possibilities, not a photo editor. Fun to play with maybe. Can produce some useful results maybe. This review really dont tell. The example above dont sell it to me.

For a detailed review, including some of my own works as examples, see my nine-page review article here on DPR:http://www.dpreview.com/articles/7572421651/The final page (page 9) gives a summary of the pros and cons.

You probably need to be interested in lo-fi for CameraBag 2 to be worth purchasing. What sets CameraBag 2 apart from the "effects" and "filters" that other editors provide is the quality of the implementation. High-quality lo-fi sounds like an oxymoron, but there's a difference between "lo-fi" and "cheesy."

CameraBag 2 can be used as a basic photo editor, but Picasa generally does that better, and for free. I have, however, been impressed by CameraBag 2's ability to rescue botched or faded photos where the problems are with exposure, contrast, and color. It's that quality of implementation again.

all graphic arts have devolved in exactly this same fashion once they reached the end of their technical maturity cycle. Look at painting... once artists achieved near photographic reality, they devolved first into the IMPRESSIONISTS and then into CUBISM and sadly we ended up with blobs of paint and urine splattered on a canvas. Same holds true for sculpting... once you achived the near reality phase (Michaelangelo's DAVID), you slid down into a lump of marble with a stick in it. Photography is no different. With the millions of dollars spent on achieving the sharpest, best imaging system and digital convenience, you had the natural movement to make pinhole cameras and light-leak effects. It's the end of the world, I tell you!

I work in both motion and stills capture. There is a point when you have achieved a perfect exposure, a perfect focus, a perfect handling of dynamic range, and you realise you have captured all the details but you have no mood or atmosphere. It can be a particular problem in TV production, where the hacks judge their images by histograms. I have, countless times, wandered around the set telling the lighting man to turn lights off, because it's not about capturing every detail but about capturing atmosphere.

Why do so many studio portraits look like waxworks?

Lo-fi tries to restore some of the process of memory and imagination, deliberately losing 100% accuracy to leave you something to add yourself in your mind. Just like chiaroscuro and deliberate shadows do.

I shoot Canon 1D, 5D, as well as Panasonic micro four-thirds amd compacts. And sometimes a Hipstamatic shot on my iPhone captures more of an aesthetic sense and atmosphere than any of them.

You are finding the most extreme possible examples here. So we can only have a "David" or a stick in a rock? No middle ground at all? No room for pseudo-reality or minor interpretations on reality? We can only have Mona Lisas or urine on canvas?

We have a long way to go before we reach the holy grail of perfect focus, perfect dynamic range photography. If we are lucky and work hard to stack, push and cojole dymanic range out of a picture it is more likely to end up looking fake and soulless. I don't like using flashes or extra lights because I to like to capture the natural atmosphere of the moment but it is rare when the camera has the range to do so. I want sharp buttery smooth detail that oozes in dynamic range in a handheld snap with no extra lighting. Someday my dream will come true but not yet.

I wouldn't pay one cent to buy a program to make my photos look worse than they already are. They look bad enough without any enhancement!

I think this whole "lets make a horrible photo" fad was spawned by people who have pretty bad cameras. (Like... cameraphones.) They simply find it more artistic and satisfying to make a bad photo worse rather than trying to make a bad photo better.

I suppose it is possible to get a good photo from a really bad camera. But only if you want something fuzzy and out of focus, and with colors skewed in every odd direction to make it look like a 40 year old faded polaroid.

Like I said, if you love this genre, then go for it.

Personally, I prefer photos that don't look like they are 40 years old and you found them in a shoe box.

The filters on these apps have actually loosened up my style. I come from a 4x5 professional background and tend to be very tight and fussy, but these apps give me a fresh outlook and tell me that it's okay to "lighten up".

Can you get a good pic from a bad camera? Story: years ago I was on the go-see list for the local college's photography program. The graduating students would come by with their portfolios, the usual boring required shots. One day a young lady walked in and I looked through her port and came across a truly brilliant image that I would have loved to call my own.

Vintage effects can be useful tools in your creative quiver.And to me,ALL'S FAIR IN ART AND WAR.

Bear in mind, that I started out in film. I am not a digital newborn.I saw most of these "effects" when they were not vintage, just flawed photos --tho sometimes accidentally and serendipitously beautiful flawed pics !

Yeah, if I wanted a light leak I'd buy a 5DmkIII! Just joshing, folks.

Light leaks can serve the same purpose as most of the other effects: to redirect the viewer's scan of the image, or to change relative emphasis. They often work better in B&W than in color, and at a reduced opacity. They're just another tool in the toolbox, to be used when needed.

The comment about the undeveloped film effect made me chuckle. Mis-loaded film (usually called "redscale") is becoming popular enough that it's now commercially available from Rollei. The redscale fans tend to look down their noses at anyone who imitates redscale digitally, though.

Really, "redscale" ?? Just think of it, pre-misloaded film -- you don't even have to accidentally screw it up yourself!

No wonder you laughed at what I thought was my outrageously satirical "undeveloped film effect" !You learn something every damn day.

Back as a lucky lucky kid, when my 2nd camera at age 11 was my uncle's old but virginal ROLLEI E with great CZ 2.8 Planar (yeah, I was spoiled stinkin' rotten for image quality right out the box) a misload (it happened a few times) was a thing of horror -- possible once in a lifetime shots ruined forever !

And now, through the wonders of whatever . . . I guess I was ahead of my time back then.

One more time I have to say about these unnatural making up about "How I''m gonna spoil my photo to make it LoFi". You soon would be tired of this process "this filter, or those or, may be that one?" Try film and you would never come back to these. Film gives you much more then "Over 100 adjustable filter". That''s why it become more and more popular again.

I liked the first Camera Bag and will try this one. PhotoScape does a lot of the things I like as well and it's free but Camera Bag 2 is priced very reasonably.

I was doing pinhole, cross-processing and lots of other effects with prints in the late 80's, so this isn't a fad for me. I had one of the original Lomo Russian cameras that was very cheap. They're a rip off now but the lomography site has been around for years so this kind of photography style can't be called a fad.

Different people like different things. Photography is a *very* wide-ranging activity. Lo-fi is becoming fairly popular in advertising and, to a small extent, wedding photography. Is it a fad? Probably... almost certainly. But if lo-fi isn't your "thing", just ignore it.

Personally, I'm already tired of "perfect" post-processing with (what I consider to be) its dispassionate assembly-line look. But that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate that a lot of people like that look and that some kinds of photography virtually demand it.

Photography has room for a lot of different tastes. If every photographer liked the same thing, we might end up in a world where every photo was of a sunset. Personally, I prefer this world.

Well. You can be tired of the perfect photography but for my opinion the perfect photography is where the real good photographers (I'm not using a word professionals here) differ from snap shooters. So from my point of view there are two options. Are you good or a snap shooter.

In this case, why buying an expensive DSLR and lenses when you can do all with your phone.This is exactly what I said to my brother who was trying to buy a DSLR. I said to him that for his needs a compact or a phone is more than enough because he will never need what a DSLR offers him.

You surely are not alone in this. Seems that just anything can be considered "art", even when the final results don't have much to convey. It's the same with music, kids scratching symphony records to "create music" which has more in common with engines than anything worth listening. I only hope the fashion turns its usual complete circle, and photography returns to its initial purpose. In the meantime, all those "vintage", "lomo", "trash" and other attempts to glorify photographic misses will have to be patiently outwaited.

Actually, I have shot digital since the days when my camera store only stocked three or four digital cameras, and I still agree with the gist of Superka's comment insofar as it concerns over-manipulation. I also feel that there is enough photography software and hardware that is ignored completely by Dpreview that it could do better than to start to review apps.

Hey, eVaar, did you just create your DPR account to lamely shoot this guy down for having a dissenting opinion? Nice going.Also I like the way you describe writing as "to create a document". I you'd call a photograph is visual facsimile.

Back in the late 70's, it was a struggle to get any kind of technically decent image from my good old SX-70. Later, it became a unique artistic tool, outstripping its consumer appeal. Ok, fine. But now, I find all of THIS endlessly amusing. Light leak?? Give me a break! It's just all about making money...Well said, Mr. Farace.

I have always been attracted to what you can't see (and have to imagine) than what you can see (HDR as an extreme example). The theories of gestalt perception (closure for example) provides the reason why we often prefer to complete the picture ourselves and this is also the reason why many people prefer 'the book' to 'the film'.

Granted, you can achieve the same results in photoshop but having downloaded a trial it is actually very good. Of course graphic designers will love this kind of tool because it abstracts and dramatises images beyond what we percieve as normal.

Some like it and some won't. It certainly isn't for those who invest their interests in quality of sensors and so on.

And Marshall McLuhen so nicely stated:

"We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."